Yes Minister, We Must Be Honest...

Being honest about government treatment of Aboriginal children means Opening the Files...

Defending his claim that there was never a 'stolen generation',the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, John Herron speaks of the benign intent of policy makers, of the lawful practice of removal of children, and says 'we have to be honest' about the facts of government treatment of Aboriginal families.

On this week's Lingua Franca ,Historian Rosalind Kidd,the author of The Way we Civilise, a history of Aboriginal Affairs in Queensland based on the Department's detailed files on every Aboriginal Queenslander over a nearly a century,says that facts and honesty mean not quibbling about semantics, but opening secret government files.

Transcript

Theme

Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca; I'm Jill Kitson. This week: Facts and Honesty: Rosalind Kidd on why they mean not quibbling about semantics, but opening government files.

John Herron: Some of those children were taken away for reasons that were legal, all of them were taken way for legal reasons at the time, and with benign intent. We have to be honest, and we have to be honest in that all were not stolen, and it wasn't a generation; by definition, the word 'generation' is that all people born about the same period, that's what generation means.

Jill Kitson: The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Senator John Herron.

Ten years ago, thanks to Marcia Langton, historian Rosalind Kidd gained access to Queensland's Aboriginal Affairs Department's secret files. Much of the information she discovered is documented in her PhD thesis and in her book The Way We Civilise. Evidence she unearthed also enabled a group of Aboriginal people from Palm Island to win substantial compensation from the State Government for the systematic abuse of their rights.

Here's Rosalind Kidd.

Rosalind Kidd: You have to wonder just why the government is using such obviously provocative language at this particular time. You can see their point, of course. In using phrases such as the 'benign intent' of policy makers, or the 'essentially lawful' practice of removal of children as the parameters of debate, the government is staking out for itself the moral high ground. We've all seen those early images of Aboriginal families living in shocking circumstances. So if the authorities said they were removing such children to a better life it's difficult to malign their integrity.

So what we have, or what the government devoutly hopes we have, is an all-encompassing mantle of philanthropy thrown over a closet which is actually bursting with skeletons.

The removal of thousands of Aboriginal children from their families, the incarceration of thousands of Aboriginal families in government institutes and remote reserves, is the biggest social experiment in our history. So let's move from the government's moral high ground that the treatment of separated children was essentially lawful and benign in intent, to question whether this treatment was either lawful or benign in practice. No-one can dispute the disastrous results of decades of government controls which are painfully and reproachfully evident today.

Just how did governments around Australia make such a scandalous travesty of their claimed good intentions? And here perhaps I find common ground with Mr Howard's insistence that we should focus on a factual analysis of the situation. I can even agree with Senator Herron's statement that we must be honest about our painful past, because that's just what this debate needs, facts and honesty. But where do we get it? Well, I've got good news and bad news for you. The good news is that government departments in each State are awash with files on Aboriginal families, on official responses to desperate need, files which bring the past and near present into fascinating life. Because don't forget, in most States these suffocating controls continued into the 1980s. So that's the good news: mountains of documented evidence. The bad news, and you've probably got a bit ahead of me here, is the problem of prising this information out of official hands.

We know that most States followed Queensland's lead at the turn of last century and implemented laws taking complete control over Aboriginal lives - where you could live, where you worked, who you married, whether you were split from your family, what you could earn and even what you could spend of those earnings, of which more later. These interventions, this nightmare of bureaucracy covering every aspect of private life, built up an enormous amount of paperwork. There are appalling letters from parents pleading to have their children returned to them, appalling letters from individuals pleading to be allowed to visit families or sick parents. Here in Queensland there was so much paperwork they kept a file on each Aboriginal individual, which, of course those individuals were never allowed to see.

But the problem is that this wealth of information, so revealing of government attitudes and operations right into the 1980s is under government control. So when Herron and Howard are talking about honest inquiry or factual analysis, let's take them at their word and say we need all the cards on the table. But strangely this is not on their agenda. Indeed the Commonwealth Government refused to make their Northern Territory information available to the Stolen Children Inquiry, and failed even to make a formal submission on their practices until it was too late for the evidence.

For professional researchers, getting access to official files is like pulling hens' teeth. While compiling my PhD thesis, I lobbied for two futile years for access to information controlled by Queensland's Aboriginal Department and only succeeded when Aboriginal activist, Marcia Langton, was briefly in a key position in 1991. As my data piled up over months of research and my senses were stunned into disbelief, I became determined that these awful chapters of our history, these unbelievable machinations of bureaucrats and politicians, would be as widely and as accurately exposed as my skills would allow.

I have a lot of trouble with the blanket claim of the 'benign intent' of the removal of children from bad social conditions, because the evidence shows quite clearly that these conditions were the result of a deliberate exclusion from the material benefits of our developing country. In every State and Territory, Aboriginal families were routinely condemned to abject poverty, which was then used against them.

Here in Queensland, men and women were contracted out to the pastoral industry for a year at a time, at only two-thirds the white wage, no doubt a winning formula for rural voter support. Meanwhile families left behind were commonly described as being without a provider, as being dependent on grudgingly given rations, and trucked off to a mission or settlement. The Department had a range of labels it could pin on members of Aboriginal families: labels such as 'will not work' or 'fails to care for children' were enough to trigger removal. But on countless occasions these labels were known to be untrue. Sometimes, when white supporters mounted official challenges, such decisions were reversed. I suppose the label 'associates with undesirables' was the most obscene, because any Aboriginal person allowed to live and work in the general community could be banished to a reserve if they spoke to their own Aboriginal relatives. So these are the historical conditions of 'benign intent'.

Now while the rest of us get to use our pay packets to feed and clothe and shelter our families, to build up bank balances and to acquire assets, to progress and prosper, this basic economic process was denied Aboriginal workers controlled by the State. Their money went directly to Department hands, and they were only allowed to spend the small change, while the government took several levies from their savings without their knowledge on top of income tax. In full knowledge that frequent frauds were committed on these private savings, the Department refused ever to allow people to see what was happening to their money.

The evidence of permanent and pernicious Aboriginal poverty demonstrates that Aboriginal families certainly did not benefit from this system. They were trapped in poverty, generation after generation, while the government grew rich on their hard-earned savings. In 1933 for instance, the government sidelined the equivalent of more than $12 million of Aboriginal savings into investment portfolios, effectively depriving people of around 86% of their own money. And we, in our ignorance, were blaming Aboriginal poverty on Aborigines.

And this system continued into the 1970s. Many people found, when they were finally given passbooks for their accounts, that there was almost nothing left. How has this practice of forced labour, embargoed earnings and multi-taxed savings benefited the Aboriginal people under government control? In many instances, as file evidence clearly shows, this exploitation of savings and of trust funds was not even 'essentially lawful'. But that's another story.

As for Queensland children and families confined on missions and settlements 'for their own good', official documents show they routinely endured starvation, unsafe water, preventable illnesses and defective medical attention, a deprivation readily measurable in scandalous rates of infant mortality and shortened life expectancy. No wonder the Commonwealth Government is keeping its own dealings in the Northern Territory tightly under wraps.

Under these atrocious conditions, Aboriginal people built and maintained the Aboriginal communities of today. Labour was mandatory, pay was negligible until the late 1960s and rations were known to be medically inadequate. Seven men who went on strike on Palm Island in 1957 when the weekly wage was the equivalent of $30 were arrested at gunpoint and removed in chains. In the late 1960s when settlement wages were less than 8% of the award wage, and the Department was withholding most private pension entitlements, 75% of child outpatients at the Palm Island Clinic registered as severely underweight. And at this time the Government was holding over $15.5 million of Aboriginal monies in investments. So just who was benefiting from this protection system?

The Queensland Government knew it was illegal to underpay its Aboriginal employees, but it was gaining millions of dollars by entrenching this poverty, almost $20 million in 1978 alone. At this time the Government even amended the Audit Act to intercept social security entitlements as rent arrears. Between 1975-85, under pressure to increase wages to legal levels, the Department simply sacked 1500 workers to balance the books. Yet at the 1996 Human Rights Inquiry into underpaid wages, the Department pleaded it couldn't find any of this evidence, although they knew it was all catalogued in my PhD thesis.

Knowing that I would present this evidence to the inquiry, the government suggested I could be sued, and subsequently demanded all my research material be forfeited. I refused to comply and the outcome eventually has been a $25 million compensation package.

Under FOI legislation, the massive research I undertook would be prohibited. In fact Wayne Goss's Labor Government amended its initial laws to enable governments to withhold for 30 years any document or truckload of documents, it chooses.

Any analysis of our past, or evidence for judicial inquiry unfortunately depends on governments allowing appropriate public scrutiny of official files. This invaluable historical resource is not the property of temporary politicians to manipulate at their will, it is the heritage of all of us. Let us not get sidetracked over the government's brawl about semantics. The real issue at hand is that Australia's treatment of its Aboriginal population is still today in breach of international human rights conventions. The government's refusal to acknowledge this breach is rooted inextricably in its denial of preceding and continuing actions. Howard says millions agree with this denial; I say when millions know what I know to be true, they will come to a very different conclusion.

Jill Kitson: Rosalind Kidd. Her book The Way We Civilize is published by University of Queensland Press.